Open Source

GitHub Open Sources Boxen Automation Tool

The community code repository GitHub has presented the open-sourced version of Boxen, a solution for Apple Mac OS X developers to use as a single-command automation tool for entry to the GitHub universe.

Boxen allows programmers to get to command-line level hacking interaction with newly boxed Apple computers within what could be as little as 30 minutes.

Boxen is described as framework for overseeing "almost every aspect" of your Mac with a massive standard library of Puppet modules optimized for Boxen to manage everything from running MySQL to installing Minecraft.

According to the developments team's Wiki, "We designed Boxen with teams that work like GitHub in mind. Boxen automatically updates itself every run and opens and closes GitHub Issues as problems arise and get fixed. With Boxen, we treat our development environments with the same care we give production: We test our code and rely on Continuous Integration to deploy changes."

NOTE: As many Dr. Dobb's readers will know, Puppet is IT automation software intended to help system administrators manage infrastructure from provisioning and configuration to patch management and compliance.

GitHub posted on its blog the following information:

Once your team writes project manifests for your applications, any member of your team can run them locally with ease. At any time, you can run a single command to get a project and all its dependencies ready to go. If any GitHubber wants to hack on GitHub for Mac all they need to do is run:

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